Definition
Jurats (plural of jurat) carries two distinct meanings in legal usage:
1. MUNICIPAL OFFICERS: Sworn officers of certain English municipal corporations, functioning in a capacity analogous to aldermen. Jurats served as governing members or assistants within borough and corporation structures, their authority derived from and defined by their official oaths of office. The term was applied to the twelve assistants of the bailiff in Jersey, where the office retained formal institutional significance.
2. NOTARIAL CERTIFICATE (more common in modern American practice): The clause at the conclusion of an affidavit or sworn statement that certifies when, where, and before whom the oath was administered. In this sense, a jurat is the authenticating attestation signed by the notary or officer who administered the oath — typically reading in the form "Subscribed and sworn to before me this [date]..." This meaning, though historically secondary, dominates contemporary American legal drafting and notarial practice.
Common Confusion
The term jurat is frequently confused with acknowledgment. A jurat involves the administration of an oath — the affiant swears to the truth of the document's contents. An acknowledgment, by contrast, involves no oath; the signer merely confirms to the notary that they signed the document voluntarily. The distinction matters legally because jurats are required for affidavits, sworn statements, and pleadings verified under oath, while acknowledgments suffice for deeds and instruments where identity and voluntariness are the operative concerns.
Jurats (the notarial certificate) should also not be confused with jurat as applied to the municipal officer. The two uses share a Latin root (jurati — sworn men) but describe entirely different things. Context and era determine which meaning applies.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
As a notarial certificate: The jurat is a formal component of the attestation clause and must, in most American jurisdictions, include the date, the location of notarization, the officer's signature, and the officer's title and commission expiration. Some jurisdictions additionally require a notarial seal.
As a municipal office: Found primarily in English borough corporations and the Channel Islands, particularly Jersey, where jurats constituted the judicial-administrative bench assisting the bailiff. The office in Jersey retains historical constitutional significance distinct from the English borough usage.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers face a genuine disambiguation problem with jurats. Law Mind corpus materials spanning English municipal law, Channel Islands constitutional history, and American notarial practice will use the term in fundamentally different ways. A document discussing Jersey governance uses jurat to mean a judicial-administrative officer; a modern American affidavit form uses it to mean the closing attestation clause. Misreading one for the other produces research errors.
For historical English municipal law research, jurats appear prominently in borough records, royal charters, and drainage and imbanking commissions — Burrill's reference to Dugdale on Imbanking points to their role in the governance of reclaimed lands, a specific institutional context rarely indexed under the term in general legal sources. Researchers working in that area should search for jurats alongside aldermen, bailiffs, and borough charters.
For American notarial and evidentiary research, the jurat-as-certificate meaning is the operative one and has largely displaced the officer meaning in domestic sources. Historical American legal dictionaries may give undue prominence to the English officer usage, creating the misleading impression that the notarial certificate meaning is secondary when it is, in modern American practice, primary.
Jurisdictional variation in notarial requirements means that a jurat clause that is formally sufficient in one state may be deficient in another — consequential when authenticating affidavits for use across jurisdictions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) treats jurats exclusively as the English municipal officer and the Jersey assistants, offering no treatment of the notarial certificate meaning. This is a significant gap: the notarial jurat was well established in American practice by the time both editions were compiled. Researchers relying solely on Black's historical entries will miss the dominant modern American usage entirely.
Burrill's Law Dictionary tracks closely with Black's on the officer definition and adds useful texture by referencing Cowell and Blount as early English authorities, and explicitly connecting the term to the Latin jurati (sworn men). Burrill also notes the Dugdale on Imbanking reference, anchoring the term in the specific institutional context of English drainage commissions — a detail absent from Black's. Burrill's additional cross-reference to cautio juratoria (a Scots law concept of security by oath) gestures at the broader oath-based framework underlying all uses of the term.
None of the three source dictionaries addresses the modern American notarial certificate usage, which is the principal context in which contemporary practitioners and researchers will encounter the word. Historical dictionary support for this entry is therefore useful for the officer meaning and essentially silent on the certificate meaning.
Jurisdictional Note
In the United States, jurat requirements for notarial certificates vary by state statute, with some jurisdictions requiring specific language, seal, and venue recitations. In the Channel Islands (particularly Jersey), jurats remain constitutional officers exercising judicial functions — a usage with no American counterpart and one that can cause confusion when English or comparative materials are read alongside American sources.